OBP2009 now available through The Trig!

We are pretty excited to see our 2009 OBP has been taken on by a boutique accommodation in Lilydale - The Trig, on Mt Arthur.

Susie and Gordon have created a new eco-friendly place to stay with stunning views over the surrounding region. It is a perfect spot to relax and share a bottle of red.

At the same time, through Susie's work with the Launceston Polytechnic, our 2010 Pinot is being used there at the Bistro, and is featuring as this week's featured wine!

New Stockist - The Aproneers

We are pretty excited to see The Aproneers, in Lindisfarne (near Hobart) taking on our wine! They have the 2009 at the moment, but stay tuned for us to be doing some tastings down there of all our wines!

Check out their fantastic store - The Aproneers (great look to the site btw folks!)

Tasmanian Red Wine Weekend

In Hobart this weekend, on the 26th & 27th of May, is the Tasmanian Red Wine Weekend; put on by Wine South. This event is being held as part of Savour Tasmania - a celebration of Tasmanian Food & Wine.

Our One Bunch Pinot Trio will be present at the Red Wine Weekend, and we are happy to see our 2011 selected to be served at the Feast of Chefs Dinner on Saturday night! This dinner for 400 people has sold out!!




If you are going, let us know how the weekend goes, especially the Feast of Chefs Dinner!!

OBP2009 is BACK!

I dropped in to see our winemaker today, and was promptly led upstairs to the mezzanine storage area. In the rear corner he showed me a long lost and forgotten pallet of 2009 Pinot Noir! Nearly 50 cases of it!

SO! Gryphonwood's One Bunch Pinot 2009 is back; older and wiser than before!

Come and try it at Harvest Market in Launceston, or call us for a bottle!

Email here...

Limited Stock of 2009 Pinot!

Aside a small allocation held for February's Launceston Festivale, our One Bunch Pinot 2009 is down to its last few cases!

With this month's release of the 2010 vintage, the timing is pretty good!

If you would like a last bottle or two before it's gone, get in touch with us or go to the website!

Good Wine Guide 2012 #2

Part 2 of our reviews in the new 2012 edition of The SMH & The Age Good Wine Guide, by Nick Stock.

2009 One Bunch Pinot $23
Given the good value tick, score of 90 points.

"A juicy, youthful pinot nose, with plenty of bright, ripe mixed-berry and cherry fruits, some baking spices and gentle cedary oak. Quite silky tannins, forward mixed-berry flavour and supple, curvy shape through the middle. Supple cherry fruits and light musk through the finish. Made for goodtime drinking."
- quoted from The SMH & The Age Good Wine Guide 2012, Nick Stock.


These reviews are also on our website!

Reviewed in the Epicure

OBP2009 received a rather nice review in The Age's Epicure, on Tuesday the 14th!

Thanks to Michele Round at Launceston's Pinot Shop for organising it!

OBP2009

A friend recently pointed out to me that I didn't properly clarify how much help our winemaker, Guy Wagner, was to us in getting our label off the ground. Not only did he source fruit for us for cover our lost 2010 vintage, he gave us an allocation of his own 2009 Pinot Noir to sell under our label.

It is important that I acknowledge this, as it finally got us off the ground and moving to the next stage in our wine business.

Pinot Unearthed's Sydney dinner a great success!

The guys at Pinot Unearthed hosted their Tassie Pinot Dinner at Fix St James in Sydney this week, and by all accounts so far it was a booming success! The wines were a hit.

OBP2009 tasted well - I heard this from a new and unusual source (for me): tweets!
One of the night's commentators had a tweet link that I thought I would follow (like a trail of bread crumbs). Little did I know that a group of diners at the event were tweeting their way through each wine!

There was a whole sublayer of conversation going on under the table and in peoples' laps...
had I been there, I am sure I would have been shaking my head at these people playing with phones in the middle of a dinner function, despite the fact they were actually saying nice things about our wine!

The irony, eh?

Pure South takes us on!

We are really excited to have the excellent Pure South Restaurant, in Melbourne's Southbank district, take OBP2009 on board!

It was at Pure South that our wine featured in Pinot Unearthed's Pure Tassie wine dinner. Whilst the night was a massive success, Pure South's food was a stand out part of the evening, with reports of the event all raving about their menu.

So, it is extremely pleasing for us to now be involved with Pure South, where our ventures into the greater winosphere first launched.

The curious effect of position...

When I say position, I do not mean prime real estate, global marketing position, financial position or any other similar position of note.

Rather, I refer to the much more interesting position of where our OBP2009 has been sitting in the warehouse! Over summer, our collections of wine from Guy Wagner's have been from pallets sitting on Bass Fine Wine's main concrete floor - shaded and kept at a moderately cool temperature thanks to the slab's thermal mass.

Our last wine collection, however, came for Guy's mezzanine level, a good three to four metres overhead and close to the ceiling. Temperatures up here have been a good couple of degrees warmer over summer.

The difference in the wines? Quite a bit! The mezzanine level wine has progressed a good three to six months beyond the same wine that has been stored on the concrete. Without doubt, it is still a young wine; however, the nose is more pronounced and the flavours much fuller.  The more developed wine is considerable more interesting, which is rather exciting really.

OBP2009 at Remi de Provence

We very are excited to see our Pinot being picked up by Remi de Provence in Hobart! Remi's establishment is impressive, with wine bar, a fantastic wine centre and the lovely bistro. Remi de Provence specialises in authentic French cuisine.

I have been looking forward to seeing One Bunch Pinot in restaurants, bistros and cafes, as I think the wine such a complement to fine food. We will be working hard to see OBP onto wine lists around the country.

If you visit Remi's, try a glass of our wine and let us know how you go!

A Pleasant Surprise!

I mentioned the other day One Bunch Pinot received a good review from the Pinot unearthed team: 

One Bunch Pinot Noir, 2009

Region:

Tasmania Pipers River & North East

Date Tasted:10/12/2010

Drink until: 2014

RATING:

16.25

Ben Edwards:17.5 Bright colour; quite a hi-toned bouquet, showing vibrant almost sour cherry aromas; the palate is also crunchy and driven by acid and chewy tannins, drawing out the finish to a quite savoury and minerally conclusion; long and with latent power taking time to unravel.

Chris Crawford:15.5 Medium to dark purple, good clarity; brightly scented macerated plums with subtle herbal undertones; simple crunchy red fruits add to its compact core; the tannins are a little course leaving a hard, grainy finish; medium length; plenty of appeal.

Dan Sims:15.5 Mid red in colour; dark macerated strawberry, wild raspberry fruit aromas and perhaps lacking a little concentration and fruit weight to back up the grippy tannic structure that surrounds the wine; whilst in that lighter bodied style, it has some charming qualities, though lacks that extra dimension.

Quoted from Pinot Unearthed 2009 TASMANIAN PINOT NOIR COMPLETE

   FEBRUARY 15TH 2011, ISSUE NUMBER 4, available as a download from their site.

All in all, a favourable result - one we are happy with...as a starting point!

However, we were most pleasantly surprised to be invited by Pinot Unearthed to participate in their Pure Tassie Pinot dinners, to be held at Pure South Restaurant in South Bank, Melbourne, and the stunning Peppermint Bay, south of Hobart. Both events will be held in March (the 9th in Melbourne; the 31st at Peppermint Bay).

The aim for these dinners is to showcase the variety and styles of Tassie Pinot. Of all the wines tasted, we are chuffed to be one of the twelve selected!

Tickets are available here. Hope we see you there!

The Intricacies of Wine Shows

Well, we recently had our first exposure to entering a wine show, and the little 'quirks' of the wine judging system.

Our One Bunch Pinot 2009 was entered in the 2011 Tasmanian Wine Show, with interesting results...
Firstly, I need to point out that this post is not an exercise in thumb-sucking, nor is it intended as a rant about wine shows. It is merely an observation that we are all indeed human.

OBP2009 was tasted at number four in its class. We soon found out the Chairman's Selection wine and gold medal winner was number three in that line up. What neither show organisers or myself knew, was the same wine as our OBP2009 had been placed in the line up as wine number two!

I must clarify this point - it is common knowledge that our 2009 and 2010 vintages were lost. Our winemaker, as well as sourcing fruit for us to replace 2010, kindly offered us some of his own 2009 wine (already released under his own label), to get our label off the ground. I did not think to ask him if he was showing his wine in the 2010 wine show, which of course he would be doing. Thus, the same wine was shown twice.

The outcome?
Wine number two was awarded a high silver by the three judges.  One Judge scored it a gold, with the average score bringing down just under the 18.5 points from 20 needed for that golden sticker on your bottle. I have to say this is a result to be pleased with!

Wine number three, the Hazards Ale Trophy winner, was Chairman's Selection for the show and a gold medal winner.

Wine number four averaged 15 points, half a point short of a bronze medal. Bupkis.

This happened recently with a Pinot Noir that won Best Pinot Noir in Show trophy in Perth, 2010 (plus 3 gold medals in the same year), only to pick up a bronze at the Hobart Wine Show. Whilst terribly disappointing, it can be understood how different judges, on different days, can score a wine quite differently.

However, to score the same wine so markedly different within one show, within two bottles of each other, is poignant. Perhaps it all comes down to timing - point number one being don't get judged after a trophy winner! (Haha! Ok ok...there's no helping that one...).

Perhaps our wine shows are too fast paced? If judges are plowing through hundreds of wines in a day, perhaps pallet fatigue is going to play a part (one would not think it would hit as early as wine four, however). Secondly, to get through that many wines in a day, I imagine one must judge at a fairly speedy pace. If a wine is judged a high silver, then nothing after a trophy winner, are judges' pallets being cleansed/rested sufficiently between tastings?

Again I must stress that I am not spitting the dummy here - for I know that in another wine show, we may receive a silver, maybe a gold. Indeed, we just received some great scores from the boys at Pinot Unearthed - a high silver and a couple of bronze.

As the number of wines at each show grows, and the sphere of influence that medals, trophies and wine writers (oft present as show judges) have over the buying public, I think it is important to remember the human element of wine shows. Results are variable. Results are inconsistent. One can see wines highly praised in wine books, then receive nothing from the same writer in the next wine show.

There can be no substitute to trying a wine yourself, and deciding if you like it, or not.

Our First Review!

We all experience the pangs of nervousness when we put ourselves out there...those quirky moments as we wait on the opinions of peers as they assess our efforts. Tis a fact of life.

So, it was a pleasant moment when Mel and I read our first review of One Bunch Pinot. Winsor Dobbin is a wine writer with a regular column in The Sunday Examiner, as well as a freelance writer for a number of other publications. Here is his blog: http://www.winsorschoice.blogspot.com/

In early January, our wine graced the Sunday Examiner's pages:

One Bunch 2009 Pinot Noir $23

It's always exciting to see the launch of a new Tasmanian label, particularly one with as much promise as this; the first release from Gryphonwood Vineyards, whose vines are at Underwood in the Pipers River region. The wine gets is name because a poor crop meant "just one bunch" of fruit came through in 2009. The owners called on consultant winemaker Guy Wagner to create a blend and this shows immense promise. There's a good balance between fruit and savoury characters and the wine, slightly spritzy on opening, gets better and better as it opens up. It was excellent after two days – and very food friendly. A label to look out for.
Winsor Dobbin
Sunday Examiner, 9th January 2011

So thanks to Winsor for his words, and here's hoping a few more like them come our way!
Cheers,
Ben